The second season of NBC’s medical drama “Brilliant Minds” kicked off Monday with what series star Zachary Quinto describes as a “mystery bomb,” with his character, Dr. Oliver Wolf, under close supervision in a mental institution.
“It’s a pretty revolutionary perspective that we come in with: we don’t know how he got there or why he’s there, and we don’t know why he can’t leave,” Quinto told HuffPost in an interview. As it turns out, Dr. Wolf’s appearance in the facility is a flash-forward, with each of the new episodes rewinding the action six months to offer “breadcrumbs that lead to what I hope will be a satisfying [end],” he added.
“Brilliant Minds,” which premiered last year, is based on the life of Dr. Oliver Sacks, the British neurologist and author known to a generation as the “poet laureate of contemporary medicine,” in the words of The New York Times.
Sacks died in 2015 at age 82, having spent most of his life both closeted and celibate. Quinto, however, portrays Dr. Wolf as a gay man who makes no secret of his sexuality among his cohorts at New York’s Bronx General Hospital, but grapples with a deep-rooted fear of intimacy that may be connected to his experiences with prosopagnosia, or face blindness, and from having grown up with an absent father.
Like Sacks, Dr. Wolf has a close confidante in Dr. Carol Pierce (Tamberla Perry), a character based on Dr. Carol E. Burnett, the first Black graduate and one of the first women to graduate from New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1960.
Written and created by Michael Grassi, “Brilliant Minds” didn’t enjoy the out-of-the-gate success of HBO’s “The Pitt.” Still, the show’s premiere season received widespread acclaim, particularly for Quinto’s performance and a nuanced take on mental health. Its two-episode finale was especially riveting, with Dr. Wolf having an unexpected reunion with his father, Noah (Mandy Patinkin of “Chicago Hope”), who had long been presumed dead.
Another buzzy plot point was Dr. Wolf’s romance with his colleague and onetime adversary, Dr. Josh Nichols (played by Teddy Sears). After weeks of slow-building tension, the two men hooked up after being shaken by a tragedy halfway through Season 1. By the start of Season 2, however, their relationship has cooled.
“Someone once said to me, ‘Once you see a happy couple on TV, that’s where you know it can’t last,’” quipped Sears, who previously co-starred with Quinto on “American Horror Story” in 2011. “There’s a lot of love there, but there’s also a lot of reality to deal with.”
Dr. Nichols, he added, will spend future episodes “attempting to understand Wolf reconciling with his father, to give him the space and time he needs. But he also wants to know how he figures into Wolf’s life. There’s only a certain amount of time he’s willing to allow Wolf that emotional grace. Ultimately these two still have to work together.”
Season 2’s premiere episode, titled “The Phantom Hook,” finds the series veering further away from the specifics of Sacks’ life, with Dr. Wolf at odds with a new neurology resident, Dr. Charlie Porter (Brian Altemus), while treating a champion boxer unable to control his own arm.
Sacks was, of course, already the subject of a more straightforward biopic, 1990’s “Awakenings” starring Robin Williams. For his part, Quinto likens his work on the show to “excavating a quarry with a spoon” while remaining true to the essence of the late medical pioneer.
“I’m grateful I had time before we started the first season to dive into Sacks’ writing, the many interviews he gave and the articles he wrote,” he said. “I feel like I laid a strong foundation for myself to understand who [Sacks] was. It was a great springboard, and now we’re swimming in the deep water, because this is its own story.”
New episodes of “Brilliant Minds” air Mondays on NBC at 10 p.m. ET, and are available to stream on Peacock the following day.
